Friday, May 3, 2019

endgame



Not making some profound statement at all but heregos: Superhero movies films always make some blustery appeal to their own value by proclaiming that you have to fight/believe in something, giving struggle inherent value, but when it comes time to emphasize what the film or the hero actually stands for or believes in, it's always vague as shit or its simply "love"  (specifically the love between 2 people and not the love thousands of bystanders have for being alive).  These film attempt to have no politics, likely to play well overseas in the burgeoning middle classes of authoritarian states with no free speech, so as a result their politics comes across in assumptions, tropes, and foremost intrinsic ideology about the use of violence as a necessary tact.  The stakes then can only seem small, even if narrative-wise they are massive, world-destroying, even cosmological.  Even when the two sides aren't entirely Manichean, the inherent virtue of the heroes is almost never questioned, their actions are always justified, the damage and recovery of what they do unseen.  Superheroism is almost always extrajudicial, yet pampered in the language of justice with only ever a passing question of this hypocrisy. It may indict institutions as being fundamentally broken but only because they inhibit a hero from doing "whatever it takes" to stop a foe- or because a specifically evil coalition has infiltrated the otherwise justified hegemon.  Of course, perhaps most potently, superhero films also reinforce the "great man theory", suggesting change only happens at the behest of those imbued with greatness rather than as the result of cooperative collectives of folks whose pressure points of oppression intersect via common enemies in positions of great power.

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